Issues 2000: Bush and Gore: Whose Pill Is Sweetest?

Here's the idea: you give seniors a chance to opt out of Medicare. If they want to, you hand them a chit worth a specified amount of money and send them shopping for their own health coverage. Bureaucracy gives way to the forces of the free market. Insurance companies, in a dash to sign up tens of millions of new policyholders, come up with an array of attractive new offerings well beyond Medicare's--dental coverage, eyeglasses, hearing aids, annual physicals, prescription drugs. Everyone benefits--and at far less cost to the government.

That, in essence, is the concept behind the Medicare plan Texas Governor George W. Bush unveiled last week. But it is also the basic approach behind a bipartisan plan that has been languishing on Capitol Hill for more than a year. And it was the notion Newt Gingrich put forward in 1995 when he was House Speaker, setting up the political standoff that produced that year's infamous government shutdowns.

It may not be a new idea, but Bush's plan marks the first time a candidate has put the idea of privatizing Medicare front and center in a presidential campaign. Attention last week centered on prescription-drug coverage, one of this year's hottest political issues, which Bush would address initially by giving grants to states to help buy drugs for needy elderly. Ultimately, however, the drug coverage he envisions would be part of a much broader overhaul of Medicare that would change the program's very nature and put private insurance companies in competition with the government to provide coverage to the nation's 33 million elderly. By comparison, Vice President Al Gore's far more expensive proposal would tinker around the edges of the current system, giving uninsured people as young as 55 a chance to buy into the program and adding prescription-drug coverage on top of the other benefits provided by Medicare.

Bush deserves credit for at least addressing the fact that Medicare is approaching a day of reckoning. As 77 million baby boomers move toward retirement, the government's cost of providing for their health care will skyrocket, to the point where the entire system is projected to run out of money by 2025. Gore has proposed shoring it up with bags of cash--he would add five years to the life of the program by shifting $435 billion from the general budget. The money would pay off part of the national debt, and the future savings on interest payments would go to Medicare. But that is a temporary fix, which is why some politicians are daring to say out loud that privatizing much or all of Medicare is inevitable. "People are moving in the direction of being essentially given a voucher, a certain sum of money, with the ability to have maximum flexibility to shop for whatever it is that suits them," House Budget Committee chairman John Kasich told reporters last week in a conference call arranged by the Republican National Committee.